Broadway : a history of New York City in thirteen miles / Fran Leadon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Mile 1: Bowling green to city hall park
1. Soaring things
2. Mud and fire
3. Promenade
4. Fire and progress
5. Barnum
6. traffic
Mile 2: City hall park to Houston street
7. Across the meadows
8. "A glance at New York"
9. Millionaires and murderers
10. "Broadway is never finished"
Mile 3: Houston street to union square
11. The bend
12. Grace
13. union
14. The rialto
15. Incendiary speech
Mile 4: Union square to herald square
16. Ladies' mile
17. The "merry chair war"
18. The freak building
19. The "light cure"
Mile 5: Herald square to Columbus circle
20. Great white way
21. Eden
22. times square types
23. Broadway ghosts
Mile 6: Columbus circle to 79th street
24. The boulevard
25. Chickens on the roof
27. Harsenville
Mile 7: 79th street to 106th street
28. The raven of speculation
29. Boomtown
30. Hometown
Mile 8: 106th street to 122nd street
31. Asylum
32. Acropolis
33. God's skyscropers
Mile 9: 122nd street to 143rd street
34. "Honest to goodness slum land"
35. Murderville
Mile 10: 143rd street to 165th street
36. The house on the hill
37. Necropolis
38. Minnie's land
Mile 11: 165th street to 179th street
39. The heights
40. Hilltoppers
41. The fourth reich
42. The ridge
43. The cut
Mile 12: 179th street to dyckman street
44. Mr. Billings
45. Mr. Molenaor
46. Mr. Barnard
Mile 13: Dyckman street to 228th street
47. Life and death in inwood
48. The last farm
49. Indian trail
50. where does this road end?

Today, Broadway almost feels inevitable, but over the past four hundred years there have been thousands who have tried to draw and erase its path. Following their footsteps, we learn why one side of the street was once considered more fashionable than the other; witness the construction of Trinity Church, the Flatiron Building, and the Ansonia Hotel; the burning of P. T. Barnum's American Museum; and discover that Columbia University was built on the site of an insane asylum. Along the way we meet Alexander Hamilton, Emma Goldman, Edgar Allan Poe, John James Audubon, "Bill the Butcher" Poole, and the assorted real-estate speculators, impresarios, and politicians who helped turn Broadway into New York's commercial and cultural spine. [This book] traces the physical and social transformation of an avenue that has been both the "Path of Progress" and a "street of broken dreams," home to both parades and riots, startling wealth and appalling destitution. Glamorous, complex, and sometimes troubling, the evolution of an oft-flooded dead end to a canyon of steel and glass is the story of American progress.